Sony Investing $20 million in PSN exclusives!

[HappySqurriel]

Zlejedi said:

HappySqurriel said:
In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.

Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.